February 3, 2015

February 3, 2015

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Behavioral Engineer

Dear Reader, 

 

In the abstract of the paper “Listening is Behaving Verbally” (2008) H.D. Schlinger concludes “there may be no functional distinction between speaking and listening.” The implications of this assertion for how we communicate, is of great interest to this writer. Specifically, he would like to know what kind of communication results from this  important notion. He suggests that Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) is spoken communication in which verbalizers and mediators, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of the skin, because they change roles, are so attuned with one another that speaking is permanently perceived as simultaneously listening and listening is always perceived as simultaneously speaking.

  

What happens when speaking and listening are perceived as functionally distinct? And, in what kind of an environment is one or the other the case? These have to be different environments. Environments in which speaking and listening are considered to be functionally distinct far outnumber those in which they are not considered to be distinct. This raises the question: why is this so? Is it because we don’t know that speaking and listening are not, as most of us believe, functionally distinct, that we keep creating environments in which speaking and listening are believed to be distinct. We would benefit if we adhered to the fact that speaking and listening are not functionally distinct, but this would require us to admit our ignorance. Scientific behavior is made possible by a contingency which stimulates us to admit what we don’t know, but such an environment can only be maintained by SVB. Environments in which we are afraid to admit that we don’t know are maintained by Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB). 

The scientific environment pertaining to writing is very strict. This led to Schlinger’s finding, but, when it comes to how scientists speak and listen, nobody bothers whether they are functionally indistinguishable. Spoken en communication is under different discriminative control than written communication. The latter is supposedly more precise and the former is assumed to have been replaced by the latter. Not much effort has gone into making our spoken communication scientific. Schlinger’ s paper is just another version of scientific beating around the busch. 

The paper mention words such as “speaking” and “listening”, but all the reader reads are words which have no bearing on how anyone speaks or listens. There is little progress in honing in on the functional account of Verbal Behavior (1957). Although Skinner regarded this as his most important work, it took a long time for behaviorists to pay attention to it. 

“The perception that Verbal Behavior was all about the speaker” has prevented many behaviorists from paying attention to listening. Like  Schlinger, they spend more hours writing than talking. Indeed, “The listener plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of the speaker’s behavior, as evidenced by Skinner’s definition of verbal behavior as “behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons” (1957).

Schlinger read Skinner, who wrote  that “the listener engages in a repertoire  of behavior that is itself verbal”, but probably neither Skinner nor Schlinger spend much time engaging in conversation  in which we talk about and listen to the conversation in which we analyze the role of speaking and listening. This writer is not saying that nothing like this ever happened, but he insists that it happened only very rarely. By talking about talking, we can be more specific than by writing about talking. 

 

Schlinger suggests “that what we most often speak of as listening involves subvocal verbal behavior.” His suggestion creates the illusion that he is talking with us, when in fact, we are only reading something which he has written. This diffusion of the distinction between spoken communication and written communication is very common and often goes unnoticed. We are so often exposed to it that we no longer differentiate between what is written and what is spoken. What good is the suggestion that there is no functional distinction between speaking and listening, if it is only written?  If this point became clear, as it should, during our conversation, we would instantly experience SVB and recognize that NVB is based on the false and nonsensical belief that speaking and listening can be distinct. 

In Verbal Behavior (1957, p. 11) Skinner writes “some of the behavior of the listener resembles the behavior of speaking, particularly when the listener “understands” what is said.” [italic added]. What he refers to is that when someone understands what is being said, there cannot be a functional distinction between speaking and listening, because they have to match. Misunderstanding necessarily involves the mismatch between speaking and listening, when the listener is listening to something other than the speaker. Under such circumstances speaking and listening seem to be functionally distinct. Whether we understand each other will depend on “forms of operant behaviors under various kinds of stimulus and motivational control.” For instance, the understanding of and the answer to a question, a mand, is controlled by motivational operations. However, to answer a question, one must know what one is talking about. When asked to pass the butter, one must be able to tact the yellow stuff, which we smear on our sandwiches. Many other forms of verbal behavior come into play.

The point of this writing is that we don’t have enough SVB to verify that there is no functional distinction between speaking and listening. When there seems to be such a distinction this signifies NVB, verbal behavior that is involved in all our problematic relationships. The “provision that the ‘listener’ must be responding in ways which have been conditioned precisely in order to reinforce the behavior of the speaker” (1957, p.225), which was a refinement of “behavior reinforced through the mediation of other persons” (1957, p.2) indicates that the verbal behavior of the listener is always already included in the verbal behavior of the speaker. 

Schlinger got it wrong that “Skinner seemed to minimize the actions of the listener.” Skinner’s statement “an adequate account of verbal behavior need cover only as much of the behavior of the listener as is needed to explain the behavior of the speaker” (1957, p. 2) isn’t as Schlinger believes a minimization of the actions of the listener, it is another indication that Skinner often experienced “the speaker and the listener within the same skin” and was intrigued by the fact that he himself “was able to engage in activities which are traditionally described as “thinking”. Moreover, as a “skillful speaker” Skinner would “manipulate his own behavior”, “review it” and “reject or emit it in modified form.” What he did was “determined” not “in part” but mainly by the extent to which he “served as his own listener.” This is a direct reference to SVB, in which the speaker listens to him or herself while he or she speaks. If this is not the case, the speaker produces NVB, because “the speaker and the listener within the same skin” are not engaged in real “thinking” and the speaker doesn’t serve as his own listener. The unskilled NVB speaker doesn’t and can't learn “to tease out weak behavior” and consequently dominates and coerces the conversation non-verbally as well as verbally. In other words, the speaker in NVB always demands the attention of the listener, but during SVB, the speaker effortlessly maintains the listener's attention.